Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

There I was looking after Numero Uno,
a tiny cog in the wheels of commerce, just
a speck in the mirror eyeing a gorgeous bust.
I was like a character out of Bruno
Schultz, confined to bed, telling tall tales
of grandfathers and earwigs, with a tame
aesthetic protector to absolve me from all blame.
I can simply tell a joke if all else fails,
I thought, then remembered Schultz’s fate, shot dead
in the street by a jealous officer of the Wehrmacht.
Perhaps I’d made my life up. Perhaps I’d stacked
a whole library in my empty head
and this was my life, or some of it, in print
on yellowed paper you might read at a squint.

The bed was like a page turned down. Out crept
a few demons of the conventional kind:
itches and burns, a verruca, undefined
scabs, weird discolourations, each adept
at its own mischief. A monastic scribe
might have depicted them fleeing city walls,
at the edge of the text, in shrivelled petals,
with the faces of a long forgotten tribe.
What insignificances had I given
birth to? Had they all conspired to haunt me?
One monster kept on multiplying, lost
in endless clones of itself. He’d never be driven
from my body, would always be there to daunt me
while I lay there like a child with fingers crossed.

The clothes hung on the door congealed to one
fat figure, somewhat like Sidney Greenstreet
in The Maltese Falcon. It was a discreet
appointment I had to make with him. I’d done
something wrong and he was to admonish
and threaten me in that lumbering way of his,
breathing and billowing in the impossible breeze.
Pointless hoping, however I might wish
for him to go. I was like Peter Lorre
but tinier still and much more vulnerable.
A bullet would find me ten minutes from the end.
I could almost hear my father begin to worry
about my lack of sleep. It meant more trouble:
a son to re-dream, one more thing to mend.